Mandela's long walk nears journey's end

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By Ed Cropley QUNU, South Africa (Reuters) - The body of Nelson Mandela arrived on Saturday at his ancestral home in the rolling hills of South Africa's Eastern Cape and was greeted by singing, dancing locals ahead of the anti-apartheid leader's state funeral set for the following day. As the hearse bearing the remains of South Africa's first black president appeared on the horizon, crowds by the road broke into "Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika" (God Bless Africa), the evocative national anthem adopted after the end of apartheid in 1994. Mandela, who died on December 5 aged 95, will be buried in his family homestead on Sunday after a state funeral combining military pomp and the traditional rites of his Xhosa abaThembu clan. But in a sign of tensions in South Africa's complicated post-apartheid social fabric, there were suggestions that the peace prevailing in Qunu, a hamlet of a few hundred houses 700 km (450 miles) south of Johannesburg, was not replicated across the nation of 53 million.

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